


It Takes Patience and Fear and Despair To Change

by Anthusiasm (HalfwayDecentFanfiction)



Series: no one is alone [1]
Category: Descendants (2015), The Isle of Lost - Melissa de la Cruz
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 00:12:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4457888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfwayDecentFanfiction/pseuds/Anthusiasm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short character study focusing on Carlos and Jay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Takes Patience and Fear and Despair To Change

No one wanted to admit it, but being a teenager on the Isle of the Lost meant dealing with just as many “do”s and “do not”s and “should”s and “should not”s “must”s and “must not”s as being a teenager in Auradon. Jay knew the rules as well as anyone. If you want something, take it. If you have a soft place, harden it or hide it. Get a reputation as the biggest, scariest, most powerful, most feared, and keep it. Make people believe they’re your friends, but don’t get attached. Stab them in the back before they stab you (and they will stab you, because they know the rules too).

If there’s a boy in your class who’s smaller than all the others, you make sure he knows it, and you take advantage.

If there’s a boy whose eyes light up in Weird Science class whenever someone assigns him a project that involves building things out of metal and wires, you try to find a way to break whatever he’s working on. You don’t look around your father’s junk shop and wonder if there’s something there you could give him that would make his eyes light up that way. You don’t carry an interesting-looking lightning rod-looking-thing in your bag for the next week, trying to work up the nerve to tap him on the shoulder and shove it into his hands. You don’t finally decide to leave it on his desk. You don’t wonder if maybe you should leave a note. You don’t watch to see if he smiles. 

When your father shouts at you later because he notices some of the stock is missing, you don’t think about that smile and feel just a little bit better.

If there’s a boy and he flinches whenever his mother makes a sudden movement, you laugh. You laugh because if you don’t laugh that might mean you have a soft place and soft places mean you get hurt, you don’t want more of those. You laugh because the boy seems to be made of soft places, and the sooner he fixes that the better things will be for him. 

You _laugh_.

Carlos liked to think he was intelligent about some things. Things that involved wires and tools and diagrams that told you where to put things and why. 

He was stupid about other things. 

Because he should really know by now that when his mother refers to things as “her precious baby,” she doesn’t mean him. He shouldn’t still feel hope rise like yeast in his chest, shouldn’t still feel a sting like a rubber band going snap against his wrist, shouldn’t be disappointed. _Not yours_ , he would remind himself. _Not yours_. 

This was his: Evie, eyes soft as water, handing him a pillow. Mal’s thorny twist of a smile as her mind moved in a million directions at once. Jay’s sure serpent hands, striking at baubles and scraps, ruffling Carlos’s hair. 

This was not his: Jay’s lightning smile, crackling warm and just dangerous enough, that rose like mercury at the sight of a pretty girl. 

The things that were his were more than he’d ever had, and they should be enough. They had to be enough. 

He’d been taught to be selfish, but before that he’d been taught that asking for things you weren’t supposed to have never led anywhere good, and that was the lesson that had taken root in the marrow of his bones. And it was nigh-impossible to guess which things were okay to ask for and which things would get him shoved against a wall and screamed at, so he had learned to keep his mouth shut. 

Sometimes, he and Jay would wrestle, and Jay would pin him to the floor. Carlos would feel the weight of Jay’s strong hands against his wrists and Jay’s hot breath on his cheek and the warmth of the sheer, honest joy that radiated from Jay’s body and he wouldn’t be able to breathe from the wanting. And he would be furious with himself, because he was trying to take something that wasn’t his out of something that was, and why wasn’t what he did have enough? 

_Not yours_ , he thought. _Not yours._

Jay lived in a junk shop full of broken things on an island full of broken things, which led him to make certain assumptions about his own wholeness. It should be noted, though, that despite its most common connotations, to Jay, the word “broken” didn’t necessarily mean “bad”, or even “needs fixing.” 

The thing was, no one _liked_ Gaston, not really. Gaston spent his days deep in his cups at the tavern, insisting that he had only been trying to help, he had really been as kind and brave and chivalrous as anyone could ask, that he had done everything he was supposed to do, that he didn’t belong here. Privately, everyone agreed with that last part. No one felt like Gaston was a _real_ islander, because _real_ islanders didn’t hide from themselves. _Real_ islanders could say, “Yes, I am ugly and flamboyant, I am selfish and greedy and vain, I want things people say I shouldn’t want and think things people say I shouldn’t think. If that is bad, these things that make me who I am, that make me a human being, then yes, I am bad. But I am also clever and determined and brave in my own way. You want me to be your villain? I’ll be the best damn villain you’ve ever seen.” There was a certain strength in that that Jay admired, the strength to know the whole world is looking at you with hatred in their eyes and hold your head high. That strength was what he thought of when he thought of the words “evil,” “bad,” and “wrong.” 

Sometimes, when he was really, truly bored beyond belief, Jay watched the Auradon News Network. He never watched for long. Something about the way everyone looked like they’d been run through a car wash and polished and waxed got under his skin. He wondered what it was like to be King Beast, trying to be a role model for an entire country, never allowed to fail or fall short. 

(Some days, listening to his father sneer at his day’s haul, he thought he had a bit of an idea). 

And sure, he had bad days, days where he thought he needed fixing, that he wouldn’t ever be good enough. Sure, some days he was acutely aware that his father was a petty, scavenging shadow of the man he’d once been, and that the other prisoners, once powerful enough to wipe out armies and clever enough to win kingdoms with a word, had been reduced to shrieking, sniping wretches who talked to walls and burned from the loss of their magic. But… 

But Evie had a recipe that would turn old bread crusts into the most delicious bread pudding he’d ever tasted. Carlos had used a pile of old wires and a secondhand textbook to crack open a spell woven by the most powerful sorcerers in the world. Mal gathered up scraps of leather and half-empty paint cans and stubby bits of chalk and made them into art. And he, Jay, knew how to take just about any broken, useless thing and tinker with it until it turned into something people would pay money for. And when he looked at what he and his friends had done, he laughed at the Auradonians in his head. _Look at what you threw away. Look at what you’re missing because you can’t bear to look at anything that isn’t perfect._

He was proud of his island, and proud of what his people had made, and proud of himself, because to Jay, “broken” meant “has the potential to be something astounding.” 

Carlos was one of those few people on the island whose family had never had contact with magic, and he was a little bit proud of that. 

He’d heard the stories, just as everyone had, of Maleficent’s dark curses and Ursula’s deceptive potions, of Jafar’s political manipulations and the Evil Queen’s reign of terror. But his mother had run a crime ring for years and pulled off countless seemingly-impossible heists, then capped it off by stealing _one hundred and one dogs_ and managing to keep them so well under control she didn't even get injured until after they escaped, and she hadn’t had one speck of magical power to help her. 

He knew he could never match his mother feat for feat (she’d told him that herself enough times) and he wasn’t about to try. But one thing he had learned from her, and from living on the island, it was that real power didn’t come from spells and enchantments. It came from the things you built with just your brain and your own two hands. 

The Isle of the Lost stank of mud and sweat and neglect, and his mother’s footsteps were the ticking of a clock in an alligator’s stomach, but whenever Carlos looked at the things he had built, at the clean floors of Hell Hall and at the inventions he made in Weird Science class and at the strange, spider-silk thing that stretched from himself to Evie to Mal to Jay, he felt an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach, like maybe what he’d helped make was enough after all. 

Charm was easy. 

It was easy for Jay to flash smiles bright as light reflecting off a mirror, to hold someone close while his hands creeped into their purse, to spit lies of liquid silver and watch them dazzle and burn. 

But when he tried to turn that towards Carlos, his stomach clenched and his smile froze and he couldn’t. He couldn’t. 

Because with Carlos, it wouldn’t be a magician’s trick, flourishing his cape and showing the audience the empty top hat or the locked cabinet while keeping his true secrets safely out of sight. It would be stripping part of himself naked, exposing one of his few soft places. It would be punching a hole in his defenses, a hole just big enough for someone to slip a knife through. 

If there was a part of him he wanted to fix, it was that one. 

Carlos had made a hole in the island’s barrier, once, and filled the air with magic, and that had felt interesting. Pretty good, even. 

But the day he’d felt the air hum with promise, the day he’d felt a tingle down his spine that made him feel like he could climb ten mountains without breaking a sweat, the day where he felt so warm that he had to close his eyes briefly and let the feeling overwhelm him, was the day he made Jay laugh for the first time. 

Jay found out that Carlos was a restless sleeper their first night at Auradon Prep. 

He thrashed and he mumbled and he moaned, and he yelled out loud a few times, not words, just loud, distressed noises. 

Eventually, Jay shook him awake. 

He didn’t ask what Carlos was dreaming about (he’d met Carlos’s mother) or if he was okay (because that was a stupid question). Instead, he pushed the beds together and said, 

“If you’re gonna keep waking me up, I want you close enough that I can kick you in the shins.” 

Once he was sure Carlos was asleep, he threw his arm around Carlos’s shoulders, carelessly enough that it looked accidental. Carlos mumbled something, curled in closer, and buried his face in Jay’s chest. Jay didn’t move him. 

_This is what I can give you,_ he thought, _and it has to be secret and broken and small enough that no one can slip a knife through. This is what I can give you, and I’m sorry there isn’t more. But maybe we can make something out of this. Maybe it can be enough._

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be a one-shot, but I have ideas about a second one-shot that, while only loosely connected to this one, is thematically similar enough that I'd rather have it as a second chapter than another installment in the series.
> 
> Also, I would like to point out that my angsty chapter title wasn't meant to be _that_ angsty, it's actually a quote from a decidedly not-angsty song. (Same with the work's title).
> 
> Thanks for reading! :)


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